Serpent Isle: Mountain King

What was the first time?!

       

The Avatar has been convicted of consorting with the MageLord's mistress. He is exiled to the Mountains of Freedom on the promise that if he finds his way out, he will be exonerated. An automaton greeted me when I arrived.

      

The entry chamber is in a brick building inside a cave running north and south. A sign next to the teleporter says "INMATES MUST WORK," something the automaton said nothing about. He locks himself in a storeroom to the south. The room is full of potions and other items. A door to the east is locked. There's a chamber to the north with three crude beds and some boxes, but its door (leading north) is also locked. Right away, I seem to be trapped.

There are some stacked crates that I start rifling. One of them has an amusing book called Lord British's Tyrannical Adventure, which has the king leering at a wench from the castle ramparts, leaning over, and accidentally dropping his crown in the moat, which apparently doubles as a latrine. For some reason, he decides to jump in after it. The townsfolk hope he'll drown, but he ultimately emerges, reeking of waste. A young boy laughs at him and British takes a swing at the kid, missing and falling to the ground. Now the whole town is laughing. British calls his guards to arrest them all, promising they'll be tortured until they wished they were dead. The end. The Avatar naturally bristles at the inaccuracies. That sounds too competent to be Lord British.

       

At least we know how "Dupre" is pronounced now.

      

I keep searching. I find a watch, fur boots, leather pants, food, and lockpicks. My initial elation at the lockpicks turns to despair when they don't work on any of the doors. Honestly, why is there an "Unlock Magic" spell but no "Unlock" spell? The only thing I can think to do is to wait for the automaton to leave his room and try to slip past him, or attack him hoping to kill him and get his key. But he never leaves his room. I wait and wait. Finally, I reload from before the trial, and go through it again, as I know the automaton leaves his chamber briefly right after I arrive.

   

He closes the doors too fast for me to get past him, so I attack instead. I manage to kill him with my staff. From his body, I loot a Sword of Defense, Dust of Invisibility, and a key, which opens all the nearby doors. Is this really the only way to do this, or did I miss something?

       

I apparently took no screen shots during this entire section except this one where I'm curing myself of poison.

        

I loot the automaton's chamber of potions, food, and money. The north door leads to a room with a "trapper" who immediately attacks. I'm forced to kill him. It's a dead end. A sign on the north wall reads: "ESCAPE IS IMPOSSIBLE." I start hunting for secret doors, and I find one right next to the sign.

      

The entry area turns out to be in the middle of a maze of corridors swarming with giant spiders, skeletons, slimes, scorpions, and hostile humans. Signs on the walls say, "PRESENT GOLD FOR FOOD" and "TRADE GOLD FOR NECESSITIES," but I never find any place to do that. Some corridors teleport back on themselves, leaving you in a never-ending loop in which enemies respawn. The key seems to be to avoid crossing wooden thresholds on the floor. I waste a bunch of reagents on "Cure" and "Heal."

   

Eventually, I've mapped the whole thing and found no way out, so I start searching for hidden doors again and find another one at the south end of the maze. I pick my way into a room where a couple of stone harpies come to life, attack, and kill me in one blow. The monks resurrect me in the same room, and I carefully back out the door. I make my way to another section with non-hostile gargoyles and monks apparently building something (there are piles of lumber). Another locked door yields barrels full of reagents. At last, I reach a chamber with a teleporter, pick the lock, and warp out of here.

          

I want to know how piles of lumber even get delivered here.

        

It takes me to a torturer chamber where a mage is working on a woman's corpse on a table. He shouts, "Thou shalt not have my reagents!" and turns into a bear. After a few blows of my sword, he escapes through another teleporter. I loot his reagents. I'm going to leave here with more than I entered with.

   

On the other side of the teleporter, I see a mage and prepare to attack, but it's not the one I chased in here. It's Stefano, the mage who steals from other mages. I visited his house in Moonshade but didn't find him. He claims unjust imprisonment and offers to join me. He claims to not be a mage, which I believe is a lie, or else I misunderstood something in the last session. He does let on that the woman I met as Selina was in fact a mage named Celennia, expelled from Moonshade after fighting with Frigidazzi.

     

Not really "selling" yourself, Stefano.

        

I accept him into my party, and we move on. We're soon attacked by a lone fighter. When he dies, his sword starts speaking to me! "At last thou has found, me, Avatar." It's the Black Sword! I thought I might find it in this dungeon, since this is where Stoneheart comes from, but I didn't think it would be quite this way. The sword immediately starts complaining: "Thou didst not bind me for service in another land. Thou shouldst release me from my prison to be free again. Wilt thou?" 

       

This is a weak argument, sword.

        

I think about it. Honestly, if he'd promise to confine his destruction to Moonshade, I'd say yes immediately. I ultimately say no, but as we'll see, I wonder what happens if you say yes. The demon warns me that the journey to Serpent Isle has "weakened my hold" on him.

    

On the way to another teleporter, we kill a female fighter who mysteriously has a dead baby on her corpse. She doesn't have a backpack or anything, so either she was carrying it when she attacked, or the game is trying to tell us that she was pregnant. (If you double-click on it, Stefano says, "'Tis tragic that one so young should perish in the dawn of life." I'm not sure that clears things up.

       

You need help, Origin.

     

The teleporter takes us to a large, open room with a throne and carpet. A mage is sitting on the throne, admonishing a minion: "Thou hast failed me for the last time." The minion begs for forgiveness, calling the mage "Lorthondo." Lorthondo kills the cowering man with a ring of . . . fire? Poison? I don't know. The minion either turns into a skeletal dragon or the mage separately summons a skeletal dragon, but either way, we're left to fight a skeletal dragon while the mage warps himself out. He's not too hard. There are piles and piles of skeletons behind the throne. This is a strange place.

      

Skeletal dragons and nightmares. It's like the developers said, "#@$% it; let's just go full D&D."

     

East of the "throne room," we find a room with a bunch of chests, most of them trapped. After taking damage from a couple of them, I experiment with both "Detect Trap" and "Destroy Trap" from the spellbook. They work well, but I hate to waste the reagents. In this game, some trapped chests only affect their immediate area, which means you can safely open them from across the room. Others cause the explosion, poison, or whatever to hit the Avatar no matter how far away he's standing. I'm not sure how you can tell which is which or why there's a difference in the first place. Anyway, the chests provide numerous pieces of magic armor and some scrolls. There's another Firedoom Staff, too, but I don't take it.

    

The chamber has two levers. A nearby sign helpfully hints: "TEAMWORK ENSURES LIBERTY." I go to pull one while Stefano pulls the other--I guess if you don't take him as a companion, or he dies, you're stuck--and together they activate a teleporter. A couple of skeletons appear but die in just a couple of swings.

   

This is a little dramatic for pulling a couple of levers.

         

In the destination hallway, we find a horrific sight: a dozen or so bodies surrounding a teleporter pad. Heads and limbs are scattered throughout the room and hallway. I figure the pad is dangerous, but it only takes us back to the throne room, so I don't know what all the bodies are about. Maybe it didn't go anywhere until we activated the other one.

      

Between the sex, gore, and dead babies, this game would have an "MA" rating today.

      

In any event, there's an alternate path by casting "Telekinesis" on a winch that lowers a bridge. The game had us find three "Telekinesis" scrolls before this point, so it would be hard to screw it up, but I suppose not impossible.

        

The toughest puzzle in the dungeon.

    

We come to a room with 12 levers, each of which (or most of which) open one of the metal doors leading to a bunch of small cells. There are plaques all over the walls. I realize at some point that casting "Translate" will allow me to read them in plain English instead of puzzling out the Britannian script, although after almost a dozen Ultima games, that doesn't really save me a lot of time. 

        

This area doesn't make a lot of sense.

        

My notes are a bit sketchy here, and I reload several times in this area while trying to figure things out and find the optimal order. The ultimate goal is to open a pair of double doors to the south. I think the optimal sequence goes like this:

   

• We open a room containing a woman sleeping on a slab. "Please help me," she says. "Lead me to my nightmare." (All 'dialogue' in this area is on the main screen, floating above the NPCs' heads. Double-clicking on them to talk does nothing. Usually, the game does this only for incidental, unimportant utterances from NPCs.)

• The woman's request makes more sense when we realize that the black horse sleeping in the southeast cell, surrounded by flames, is a D&D-style nightmare (a demonic horse) making its appearance in Ultima for I think the first time. We lead her to the cell and open the door. She beseeches it to wake up and offers it a carrot. It rears up, lightning strikes, and the nightmare disappears while the woman falls down dead.

         

Did the lightning kill the woman or did the nightmare? Did the lightning teleport the nightmare?

         

• The woman's body has a key and a carrot. The key opens a chest in a nearby room full of crates. The chest contains even more carrots and a note. The note explains a little more. It's written to an "old man" by the owner of the nightmare. The note promises to free the old man from the dungeon if he'll care for the nightmare and keep Sabina away from it. "I fear that she doth frighten him." It also warns him to take care "for one strike of [the nightmare's] hoof could kill an old fool such as thou." Finally, the note asks the old man to take care of "my small furry prize" by placing a carrot on its golden plate once per day.

• The plate in question is in a western room where a rabbit hops around, though the note warns that it's more than a rabbit. The plaque outside reads: "ENTER AT THINE OWN RISK." Placing a carrot on the plate somehow causes a woman (labeled "wench" by the game) to appear. She thanks us and leaves us a "reward": a bouquet of flowers. At first, I thought the rabbit turned into the woman, but the rabbit is still in the cell after she leaves, so I don't know what happened.

      

I'm not sure I deserve a reward for putting a carrot on a plate, but I won't complain.

        

• In the cell south of the rabbit is a ranger crying over the body of his dead wife or lover. "I'll never forget thee," he says repeatedly. "Thy life was my life. What have they done? They shall pay!" He doesn't acknowledge my presence until I put the bouquet of flowers next to the woman's body. "I shall repay thy kindness," he says, before walking to the levers and fixing one that was jammed. He then says, "Now I can rest," turns into a skeleton, collapses, and disappears. I'm not sure how anybody "paid."
  

• Side note: a barrel in the ranger/woman's room contains a dead child. The body has a gavel, a whistle, a magic orb, a Ring of Regeneration, and 3 guilders on him. Using the orb shows it to be a Magic 8 Ball. 

        

Maybe we won't tell the ranger about this. He seems to have enough to deal with.

     

• The unjammed lever opens a cell with a tree and a teleporter pad. Walking into the cell takes us to an outdoor area. Walking too far in this area just returns us to the cell. There's a blue lever in this area. Pulling it and one of the other levers opens the double-iron doors that lead to the exit.

• There's a final lever that produces the message "that did something" when you pull it, but I have no idea what it did.

        

There are other rooms containing trolls, skeletons that turn to pikemen, and animal bones and rats, but nothing important.

   

South of the chamber, we find a locked door that opens with what I think is the first key I got when entering the dungeon. You definitely don't want to drop keys as you use them in the Mountains of Freedom. I think half the doors open with that first key.

    

A firepit conceals a teleporter that takes us to another set of caves. An automaton sells food and healing. We kill him and loot his storeroom. A nearby room has a puzzle that requires us to stack crates to reach a bell, which ultimately teleports us to another area with more teleporter pads. Honestly, this whole experience is really dragging at this point. I think there's another endless corridor and secret wall in here at some point, but I lost track of the order of things.

     

This engine does many things well, but I'm not a fan of having to nudge my characters up stacks of crates.

        

There's another automaton selling potions, and he tells us that he has the key to the exit. We kill him without too much trouble. I haven't been mentioning potions, but the dungeon has been pretty generous with both potions and scrolls, and I've been using them liberally to restore health after combat. I even used "Sleep" and "Poison" potions on a nonsensical trio--goblin, monk, jester--who attacked towards the end. I probably could be making better use of the spellbook--it occurs to me late in the session that the "Create Automaton" spell would have come in handy--perhaps you don't need Stefano with you if you use it--but the combats haven't been difficult enough to require it.

   

The final door opens not to the last automaton's key but to the first one's. Lorthondo confronts us in the final cave and blocks the way back. As he casts spells at the two of us, the demon in the Black Sword speaks up: "Thou doest not possess the skill or power enough to overcome the madman Lorthondo thou must face . . . Free me and I shall help thee win free of this place!" 

        

I just love when a game gives me no choice and then calls me a "fool."

       

I refuse and Lorthondo kills us. I try again with the same result. Clearly, this moment is scripted to force me to do what the sword wants. I finally give in. "Free! Free! Free at last!" the demon gloats. "Thou art a fool, Avatar! Thou hast no idea what thou hast lost! I thank thee for thine ignorance." But he adheres to the agreement and blasts Lorthondo with a spell that leaves body parts smoldering around the room.

      

The end of Lorthondo.

      

(You are wondering what happens if you free the demon from the sword when he asks earlier. I replayed most of the damned dungeon to find out. He gives you the same speech when he departs, but he still shows up to kill Lorthondo when you reach the mage.)

    

A final teleporter brings us back to the teleport pad in Moonshade's "city hall." Stefano thanks me and departs, saying he'll be there if I need anything. Decent guy for a thief. My equipment waits in a chest next to the pad. I'm not sure why my companions just didn't take it.

      

This is going to take a while.

      

Speaking of my companions, I desperately need to sort out my inventory--the stuff I brought from the dungeon, my old stuff, and the stuff that Stefano dumped on the floor before departing. I need my companions for this, but I have no idea where they are, so I start hunting around town. I'm 100% sure I'll find Dupre in the tavern, and I do, but on the way I notice Boydon working in Ducio's shop. When he rejoins the party, the game forces him to take on the snarky dialogue that another party member is supposed to deliver.

       

Seeing no other party members, Boydon kindly does his own heckling.

     

Iolo is working with Gustacio to figure out the lightning storms. Shamino "hath gone into the woods to hunt wild game," says Dupre. I figure I'm going to have to spend hours searching for the ranger outside the city, but no, Shamino is so dumb that he thinks the copse of trees inside the city walls is "the woods."

         

"And if I had thought thou would not return, I'd still be waiting here at this establishment."

           

Shamino relates that after I was tossed into prison, Frigidazzi met with him and expressed remorse. She gave him three things to give to me: a scroll of "Chill," a serpent earring, and a note. When I receive the earring, and apparently put it in, an image of a serpent appears and says, "Welcome back." I don't know what to make of that. The note, meanwhile, is both an apology and love letter. She expresses remorse for causing the Avatar to get arrested but also says that memories of the night won't leave her. Oddly, the note mentions "earrings," plural, while I believe Shamino only gave me one. 

    

Thanks, I guess, spectral cobra thing.

         

It takes me about an hour to put my party back together and get the inventory sorted out. After that, it's time to kill Fibercio, but of course the MageLord is nowhere to be found. I have to be content with looting his chambers.

    

There were things to like and things to dislike about the Mountains of Freedom, and I feel they cancel each other out. I feel like the developers could have taken two approaches with the dungeon:

 

1. An authentic puzzle dungeon with lots of riddles, mechanical puzzles, and other attempts to bring Dungeon Master-style gameplay to Serpent Isle's interface. 

   

2. A strong thematic dungeon full of backstory, lore, and role-playing choices like the one in Ultima Underworld.

   

Instead, we got a weird hybrid of the two. If Lorthondo has any backstory, I never encountered it in Moonshade. NPCs and books have built up the executed necromancer, Vasculio. Why isn't there equal attention given to this Lorthondo? (It's possible that there was, and I missed it.) The nature of the dungeon is also left a little vague. There's a suggestion in the "old man" note that Lorthondo created it as a test, but everything that happens is a bit too bizarre to be any kind of test.

        

This is what the demon looks like, by the way.

        

If I had written this dungeon, I would have said something like: "Filbercio has exiled mages to the Mountains of Magic for years. These diverse mages have interacted with the dungeon's Stoneheart in dangerous, unpredictable ways, creating a confusing nightmare of monsters, apparitions, and living memories." I would have presented it as a kind of "wild magic" zone. That's how it feels, but not how it plays in the game's lore.

The Black Sword bit was also unsatisfying. I don't like fake roleplaying choices. If the demon had to be freed no matter what, then the developers should have scripted something more interesting. In a dungeon full of mages and dangerous rocks, there are any number of ways to explain the demon's escape.

     

I wanted to wrap up this entry with a quick "What's New?" tour of the city, but I ran out of time, so I'll have to tackle that next time. Something had better be new, or else I have no idea how to leave Moonshade.

Time so far: 33 hours